I am fairly new to the Arduino community so I apologize if this question seems obvious..

I bought a 5x7 Led Matrix from the store where they told me it was the anode version. I have tried to get it working but all i get are results of the board flashing or turning on all the LEDs and never the specific chosen ones. I have followed ALL 4 tutorials I could find online but all warrant the same result.

i use the led matrix without any other parts as shown in the arduino playground

That is one of the bad tutorials that can damage your arduino because there are no current limiting resistors in line with the LED. The lack of resistors won't stop it appearing to work though it will just do the damage. Note on the arduino page hey do mention that.

So it looks like you have not identified the wires into your matrix correctly. What have you done to ensure that the anodes and cathodes are what you think they are?

These?http://www.kingbright.com/manager/upload/pdf/TC20-11SYKWA(Ver1292470838.7)So presumably you are driving the 7 anodes from something with current limit resistors, and sinking the 5 cathodes one at a time to turn on one column at a time?Or are you driving only 1 anode high and only 1 cathode low at a time for much slower multiplexing?

Okay, one common way to tdo that is to drive all 5 anode hi or low, and pull one cathode, then repeat that for the next 4 columns quickly.You will define some fonts, Imagine the letter A as a 7 tall x5 wide array with 1 = LED on and 0 = LED off:

Can you follow that? You are the driving the LEDs for a column at a time, and using persistence of vision to make the eye think any LED can be on at any time.You can see how this would fit nicely into a loop, then expand from there to have the fonts predefined in an array where you would call up the letter/number in question, then expand from there to have say 3 letters in a 15 byte array and roll along to pick 5 bytes from that array for display (0-4, 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-8, etc) to give the impression of scrolling text, and put new bytes in as needed to go thru your message...

Here's a video of my 8x32 display doing similar:

http://youtu.be/hwYqgyMc5S4

Scroll test of 8x32 LED matrix. Can hold up to 233 characters in SRAM. Will be ~40 more once I push 5x8 fonts out to PROGMEM.

No you should not be doing. The point is that you have some memory that contains the bit pattern, then you apply that memory to the hardware. The code that does the refreshing does not change no matter what you display.Read this:-http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Workshop/LED_Matrix.html